The World According to Bob

I knew it wasn’t helping anyone, least of all myself, but I didn’t know what to do to dig myself out of the black hole that had been slowly consuming me these past few weeks. One morning, however, I woke up and decided that enough was enough. I simply had to do something about it. I didn’t care what the doctors thought about me and my past: I wanted some answers, I wanted this problem to go away. I got dressed, grabbed my crutch and headed for the local surgery, determined to have a proper examination.

‘That’s an interesting crutch you have there, Mr Bowen,’ the doctor said when I turned up in the consulting room.

‘Necessity is the mother of invention,’ I said, sticking the weather-beaten pole in the corner and climbing on to the examination table where he began casting an eye over my thigh and leg.

‘This doesn’t look too good. You need to keep pressure off that leg for a week or so. Can you take time off work?’ he asked me.

‘No, not really. I sell The Big Issue,’ I told him.

‘OK, well you need to see what you can do to keep your foot elevated at all times,’ he said. ‘I also need you to have what’s known as a D-Dimer blood test which looks for clotting in the blood cells. I suspect that’s where your problems lie.’

‘OK,’ I said.

‘Now, what are we going to do about this crutch of yours? I think we can do better than a tree branch,’ he said.

‘No chance of a wheelchair?’ I said, suddenly remembering the one I’d seen in the car park.

‘Afraid not. But I could offer you a decent set of crutches while we try to get this swelling and inflammation down.’

By the end of the morning I was the proud owner of a pair of proper metallic crutches, complete with rubber grips, arm holders and shock absorbers. I was soon clunking my way around with my legs flailing in front of me. I was acutely conscious of the way it must have looked. I felt silly, even sillier than I’d looked with a pole under my arm. I could feel what people were thinking about me. It was depressing.

The time for feeling sorry for myself was over, however. I didn’t waste any time and went to have the blood test done the following day. It wasn’t that straightforward, of course. Taking a blood sample from a recovering heroin addict is easier said than done.

The practice nurse at the clinic asked me to roll up my sleeve but when she tried to find a vein she failed miserably.

‘Hmmm, let’s try this other arm instead,’ she said. But it was the same again.

We exchanged a look that spoke volumes. I didn’t need to spell it out.

‘Maybe I should do it,’ I said.

She gave me a sympathetic look and handed me the needle. Once I’d found a vein in my leg, I let her extract the sample. The humiliations of being a recovering addict were endless, but I wasn’t going to let that deter me.

A couple of days later when I rang the clinic the female doctor confirmed my worst suspicions. She told me that I had developed a deep vein thrombosis, or DVT.

‘You have a blood clot which I’d like to have further investigated. So I need you to go to University College Hospital for an ultrasound test,’ she told me.

In a way it was a relief. I’d always suspected I’d caused myself a problem on those long flights to and from Australia. Looking back on it I could see that I’d suppressed the thought for all sorts of silly reasons, partly because I hadn’t wanted to sound paranoid but partly also because I hadn’t wanted to have my suspicions confirmed. I knew that DVTs could cause all sorts of problems, particularly coronary ones, strokes in particular.

Given all this, I was on edge over the next week or so while I waited for the ultrasound appointment. Bob and I carried on going to work but I was only going through the motions. I was terrified to do something that might trigger a stroke or heart attack. I even stopped interacting with him when we sat on the buckets together. He’d look at me every now and again, expecting me to produce a treat so that we could start performing for the commuters. But more often than not my heart wasn’t in it and I’d turn away. Looking back, I was too wrapped up in myself. If I’d looked I’m sure I’d have seen the disappointment written all over his face.

When the appointment day came I dragged myself to UCH on the Euston Road and passed through a room of expectant mothers waiting in the ultrasound department. I seemed to be the only person who wasn’t excited to be there.

I was led off by a specialist who slapped loads of jelly on my leg so that he could run the camera around, the same as they did for the mums-to-be. It turned out that I had a massive, six-inch-long blood clot. The specialist sat me down and told me that he suspected it had started as a small clot but had thickened and clotted further along the edge of the vein.

‘It was probably hot weather that set it off and then you’ve exacerbated it by walking around on it,’ he said. ‘We will prescribe you a blood thinning medicine and that should sort it out.’

I was relieved. Unfortunately, I wasn’t quite in the clear.